CARD-TELEGRAMS.
Great as have been recent improvements in our postal service, we have yet to learn something from the Parisians, whose system of Card-telegrams is worthy of notice. The cards are of two kinds—namely, yellow similar to our own, and blue, which, when secrecy is desired, may be closed. By dropping the card into the Card Telegram Box at the nearest telegraph office, it is shot through one of the pneumatic tubes which are now being extended all over Paris, and is delivered at its destination within half an hour. Fifty to seventy words can be written on the card, the cost of which is threepence. It is further intended to permit of cards being dropped into the boxes up to fifteen minutes of the departure of the mail-trains, a boon which merchants in Great Britain may well envy.
HOW AND WHERE THE HERRING SPAWNS.
According to a contemporary, we learn that Professor Cossar Ewart, Edinburgh University, convener of the Scientific Investigation Committee of the Board of Fisheries, was at the beginning of March at the well-known fishing-ground off the coast of Ayrshire known as the banks of Ballantrae, when some interesting investigations were made into the nature of the sea-bottom and spawn deposited on that famous herring-bed. The banks were dredged from a depth of eight to twenty-two fathoms. At a depth of eight to eleven fathoms the bottom was composed of clean gravel, with very little seaweed; beyond the eleven fathoms, clay, mud, and shell. On the stones lifted by the dredge, portions of herring spawn were found firmly attached to the surface of the stones in different stages of development, the more advanced manifesting, in lively action, the embryo herring. Spawn was also taken from the living herring and placed on glasses in hatching-boxes, and these also showed the eggs in progress of development. From a small stone of a few inches of surface as many eggs were found as, if allowed to arrive at maturity, would have yielded crans of herrings. The information obtained by Professor Cossar Ewart, during his recent dredgings, will be of the greatest importance in throwing light upon a hitherto but imperfectly understood question in natural history.
The banks in the evening presented a scene of lively interest, for as the sun began to set, a school of at least forty whales and porpoises began to play, and, circling around the margin of the fishing-banks, rose and fell in graceful plunges, their black fins and backs rising in curves for a moment, and then disappearing, while the porpoises made wild leaps many feet clear out of the water. Their presence was accounted for next morning, when a good many of the seine trawlers entered Loch Ryan and Girvan with from one to three hundred baskets of herrings each.
Professor Cossar Ewart has since had some more successful dredgings. He has also made some important discoveries regarding natural and artificial spawning, and deposited live herring and a quantity of spawn in the aquarium at Rothesay.
A FLOURISHING FRUIT-FARM.
At Toddington, in Gloucestershire, there has been going on for a few years the cultivation of fruit on a very large scale; a fruit-farm of five hundred acres having been planted by Lord Sudeley, and which, we are glad to know, has proved so successful, that its area is about to be enlarged to the extent of other two hundred acres. An enormous number of fruit-trees of many kinds has been planted, along with thousands of currant-bushes, whilst upwards of a hundred acres of the land are devoted to the growth of strawberries. A noteworthy feature of the scheme consists of a market being found for the smaller fruits on the ground on which they have been grown. In other words, Lord Sudeley has, with great foresight, erected a suite of boiling-houses and packing-rooms, which have been let to an enterprising person, who manufactures genuine jams and jellies from the fruit grown at Toddington. In fruit-preserving, the English and Scotch boilers—and the latter class have largely increased during the last few years—have a great advantage over their brethren of the continent and the United States, because of the greater cheapness of the sugar, which is required in large quantities. It is to be hoped that the example set by Lord Sudeley will be speedily followed by some of his territorial brethren. As a nation, we could manage to consume much more fruit than we do at present, if we could obtain it at a moderate price. In the orchards at Toddington have been planted as many as thirty-two thousand plum-trees, nine thousand damson trees, and three thousand nine hundred pear and apple trees, while there are no fewer than two hundred and twenty-eight thousand black-currant bushes.
THE GRAPE AND PEACH IN AMERICA.
The old saying about the inutility of carrying coals to Newcastle receives a new rendering in the fact that vine plants are being brought from America to replenish the vineyards of France, which have been in some instances devastated by the phylloxera. Grapes are now extensively grown in the United States both for dessert and wine-making. A lady who has recently been travelling in California, where the grape family is wonderfully numerous, and many of the vines exceptionally prolific, sometimes obtaining a ‘luxuriance which sounds almost incredible’—this lady—C. F. Gordon-Cumming—tells us, among other facts, of bunches of grapes which have been found to weigh as high as fifty pounds! The vineyards of Colonel Wilson, in the neighbourhood of the garden-city of Los Angeles, cover two hundred and fifty acres of ground, and the grapes yield one thousand gallons of wine to the acre. In another vineyard, there grow upwards of two hundred varieties of grapes; and in the cellars of its proprietor are stored two hundred thousand gallons of grape-juice, ripening into wine, of which many kinds are made in the state of California. Need it be said that grapes in these regions are cheap—a hatful can be purchased for a few cents! Only think of the above-named Colonel Wilson having ‘two and a half million pounds of grapes, hung up by their stalks, to keep them fresh for the market’! That fine fruit, the peach, is equally cheap in the peach-growing districts of the United States. The annual value of the American peach-crop is estimated at eleven and a half million pounds sterling. In some seasons, peaches are so abundant, that, to prevent their being lost, they are used in immense quantities for the feeding of pigs. Cannot this fruit be utilised for consumption in Europe? Supplies of the fresh fruit might be sent to us in the refrigerated chambers of the steamboats.